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Open Web Device

openwebdevice.com

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Re: Open Web Device

#31

Post by flpmor »

toyg wrote: post #23
AndrewDucker wrote: post #3

It looks like all "apps" are web pages. I'm looking forward to seeing how well they can make it run things like Angry Birds. And how well they deal with background tasks. On Android I can upload my photos in the background, or play music through Spotify (or my MP3 app) while I'm doing other things. Will I be able to do similar things here?

And how well they deal with security. I look forward to the day when a malware-distributing webpage can pwn millions of phones without being detected... EDIT: uh, downvotes?

MY first reaction was about security as well. This change of paradigm is a recipe for disaster if security is not considered from the beginning because most of the assumptions change. If it's not done carefully (things like segregation between apps, access control to privileged JavaScript, etc)... it is going to pretty painful.

Re: Open Web Device

#32

Post by AndrewDucker »

daeken wrote: post #29

Wow, what a thing to wake up to! At the heart of the Open Web Device is Mozilla's Boot2Gecko project. I just joined up with Mozilla on B2G a couple weeks ago and it's been an honor to work alongside so many amazing people, with a great goal: building a truly open mobile ecosystem. If you guys have any questions about B2G itself, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

I had a couple of questions on how you'd implement things like Spotify or Dropbox (i.e. apps that download a bunch of files, or upload existing ones).

And also about how apps would interact with each other (so that I can change out one SMS app for another, but have everything else continue to work).

Oh, and will it support things like different keyboards? I love that on Android I'm not using the home screen, keyboard, email, SMS, or calendar apps, and it all just works fine.

Re: Open Web Device

#33

Post by miloco »

mikehuffman wrote: post #9

This is actually a big deal. It is a step in the right direction to take care of the missing pieces of mobile app development. I really believe that in 5 years time, "application development" will be just assumed to be web app development and not desktop application development.

I disagree. The thought of maintaining an app with a large code base written in JavaScript doesn't seem like a "step forward" to me. I'd much rather stick with my Android apps object oriented code base and associated tools.

Re: Open Web Device

#34

Post by daeken »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #32
daeken wrote: post #29

Wow, what a thing to wake up to! At the heart of the Open Web Device is Mozilla's Boot2Gecko project. I just joined up with Mozilla on B2G a couple weeks ago and it's been an honor to work alongside so many amazing people, with a great goal: building a truly open mobile ecosystem. If you guys have any questions about B2G itself, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

I had a couple of questions on how you'd implement things like Spotify or Dropbox (i.e. apps that download a bunch of files, or upload existing ones). And also about how apps would interact with each other (so that I can change out one SMS app for another, but have everything else continue to work). Oh, and will it support things like different keyboards? I love that on Android I'm not using the home screen, keyboard…

So, in terms of an app like Spotify, you'll build it based on common web standards, e.g. offline storage APIs for caching. Dropbox is a more interesting case, as the basic use case of things like photo uploads from the app use the standard media APIs, but integrating it into the rest of the system requires a lot more work.

The answer for integration is more a global one, and honestly I don't have a good answer yet. I could see something like Web Intents/Web Activities enabling replacement of the homescreen or keyboard and perhaps eventually integration with the likes of Dropbox, but there's still a lot of work to do before that point.

To me, these sorts of important, unanswered questions are where B2G wins the most. Rather than coming up with the answers in isolation and then pushing the result on the world, we encourage everyone to get involved in the process, and we will make it into another web standard that benefits everyone, not just Mozilla or B2G users/developers.

Re: Open Web Device

#35

Post by pooriaazimi »

miloco wrote: post #33
mikehuffman wrote: post #9

This is actually a big deal. It is a step in the right direction to take care of the missing pieces of mobile app development. I really believe that in 5 years time, "application development" will be just assumed to be web app development and not desktop application development.

I disagree. The thought of maintaining an app with a large code base written in JavaScript doesn't seem like a "step forward" to me. I'd much rather stick with my Android apps object oriented code base and associated tools.

CoffeeScript and Backbone.js kinda solve that problem.

Re: Open Web Device

#36

Post by MatthewPhillips »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #32
daeken wrote: post #29

Wow, what a thing to wake up to! At the heart of the Open Web Device is Mozilla's Boot2Gecko project. I just joined up with Mozilla on B2G a couple weeks ago and it's been an honor to work alongside so many amazing people, with a great goal: building a truly open mobile ecosystem. If you guys have any questions about B2G itself, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

I had a couple of questions on how you'd implement things like Spotify or Dropbox (i.e. apps that download a bunch of files, or upload existing ones). And also about how apps would interact with each other (so that I can change out one SMS app for another, but have everything else continue to work). Oh, and will it support things like different keyboards? I love that on Android I'm not using the home screen, keyboard…

note: I don't work for Mozilla but follow B2G closely. All of this stuff is possible. Everything in B2G is a web app, including the keyboard IME (and the browser, and the window manager itself). You can definitely swap that out. The only thing that's not swappable, to my knowledge, is the phone app.

Re: Open Web Device

#37

Post by MatthewPhillips »

miloco wrote: post #33
mikehuffman wrote: post #9

This is actually a big deal. It is a step in the right direction to take care of the missing pieces of mobile app development. I really believe that in 5 years time, "application development" will be just assumed to be web app development and not desktop application development.

I disagree. The thought of maintaining an app with a large code base written in JavaScript doesn't seem like a "step forward" to me. I'd much rather stick with my Android apps object oriented code base and associated tools.

JavaScript is object oriented. If you don't like JavaScript there are dozens of languages that compile to JS.

Re: Open Web Device

#39

Post by daeken »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #36
AndrewDucker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a couple of questions on how you'd implement things like Spotify or Dropbox (i.e. apps that download a bunch of files, or upload existing ones). And also about how apps would interact with each other (so that I can change out one SMS app for another, but have everything else continue to work). Oh, and will it support things like different keyboards? I love that on Android I'm not using the home screen, keyboard…

note: I don't work for Mozilla but follow B2G closely. All of this stuff is possible. Everything in B2G is a web app, including the keyboard IME (and the browser, and the window manager itself). You can definitely swap that out. The only thing that's not swappable, to my knowledge, is the phone app.

It's super easy to swap out any piece (or replace the whole UI) if you're willing to mess around on the device, but there's no way to do this from the UI as it stands, like you can with Android. I'm excited to see the solution to that problem.

Re: Open Web Device

#40

Post by unoti »

miloco wrote: post #33
mikehuffman wrote: post #9

This is actually a big deal. It is a step in the right direction to take care of the missing pieces of mobile app development. I really believe that in 5 years time, "application development" will be just assumed to be web app development and not desktop application development.

I disagree. The thought of maintaining an app with a large code base written in JavaScript doesn't seem like a "step forward" to me. I'd much rather stick with my Android apps object oriented code base and associated tools.

I've been rewriting my latest released Android game in Html5 and Coffeescript for PhoneGap, which lets me deploy on iOS and Android, plus Blackberry and other platforms, but I'm focusing on iOS and Android for now. I'm doing that because I need to make an iOS version, and would rather spend my dev time adding more features or developing more products rather than redeveloping the same product on multiple platforms. This approach also opens me up to the possibility of having a web version, perhaps a Facebook and/or Google+ module. I'm astounded on how much smaller my code is in Coffeescript than Java. It's about 1/2 the size of its Java counterpart.

Many people will of course not move on to HTML5 app development. Every time technology changes, lots of people don't migrate. But it really is an amazing way to go. Coffeescript solves a lot of problems and makes the code very small. Jasmine unit testing helps with the scary feeling of not having type safety. PhoneGap lets you deploy it as a native app. Chrome has a surprisingly awesome stepping debugger built right in. Vim + the cofeescript plugin automatically compile the Coffeescript every time you save. The difficulties of debugging in Coffeescript are mostly overstated in my experience, and countered by the feeling that I'm developing code faster than I ever have before in any other language.

It's not all cake and ponies, and I've had to figure out a number of things. But it's a really fantastic way to develop apps. Try it.

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